We are participating in cerARTmic with a solo project by artist Núria Fuster, presenting her project “(M)OTHER AND ANOTHER”, in which ceramics becomes the main medium for experimentation.
(M)OTHER AND ANOTHER is a project where Núria Fuster consciously breaks the boundary between her identity as an artist and her domestic responsibilities. This reconciliation goes beyond simply balancing two separate spheres; it proposes embracing the presence of one within the other. This rupture also transforms her usual working process, as well as the materials and forms she employs. The body emerges as both tool and material in a series of ceramic sculptures. The bodies represented undergo metamorphosis and inhabit an intermediate space between fiction and the most ordinary forms of reality.
Just as shouting or saying something out loud can be a way to make a thought real, so can giving shape to experiences through lines (words, drawings) or giving them form (by creating or reclaiming existing objects). Somehow, feeling presence or touching remains—for many generations—the way to know that something exists, or to recognize that something is happening. Thus, (M)OTHER AND ANOTHER is a verb. I understand this exhibition as a physical movement—a step forward—after having lived the pandemic experience of domestic confinement. It is a statement on the relationship between my artistic practice and domestic labor. I choose to break the wall that separates them and to establish a nearly therapeutic reconciliation that leads me to new processes like ceramics. As Jon Mikel Euba once said, “an artist is someone who does what they can with what they have.” My artistic practice has adapted to my context in this way. I began to focus on behaviors and processes within the domestic space: dust settling, cleaning rituals, weekly grocery shopping, economics, food, living spaces—elements which, for the most part, are material realities neglected by cultural discourse. I work from a reappropriation of the condition of motherhood, and from the indivisible duality that comes with practicing art while simultaneously engaging in the education, care, and nurturing of new human beings. This project reflects the functional aesthetics surrounding my daily work, building a body of work that fuses my lived experience, without being able to cease being an artist, a mother, or a homemaker all at once.
Núria Fuster (Alcoi, 1978) explores in her work the material side of reality—not only as a device for self-reflection but also as a way to attend to behaviors and processes that reveal the natural hegemony of things within domestic or other specific contexts. She draws on the functional aesthetics of her daily work, establishing dialogues between materials of various kinds and generating a new space—an interface—where materiality shifts from object to subject and speaks for itself. Her work is an attempt to understand nature and to decipher the very materials that shape her reality. She sees sculpture as an intimate dialogue with the world, with the desire to give her works a living autonomy, allowing them to yawn, smile, and dance. Strongly drawn to objects—as symbols, as bodily schemata attached to our own bodies, as social poems, time capsules, or forms of writing—she emphasizes materials as witnesses of life, revealing how they can contribute to the (re)narration of one’s own reality.